Corel settles in Lamarr pic lawsuit

Famous actress signs five-year licence for face

Our picture doesn't show glamorous actress Hedy Lamarr, who yesterday came to a settlement with Corel over the use of her image on Corel's packaging. But we suppose that following the settlement we could have used a picture of Corel's packaging. Lamarr sued Corel earlier this year over its use of a CorelDraw image of her. The picture had been produced by John Corkery, who was 1996 Best of Show winner of the Corel World Design Contest. Corel now seems to have come to an undisclosed settlement with her, which includes a five-year exclusive (oops -- maybe we can't use the pack-shot then) licence to use "the lifelike vector illustration of Hedy Lamarr on Corel's graphic software packaging". Lamarr, bless 'er, says she's looking forward to the continued success of Corel Corporation, while Corel's release on the subject points out that in 1941 she was "busy pioneering a wireless data communications system that would form the basis of today's 'spread spectrum' mobile phone and wireless Internet access technologies. Lamarr is the recipient of the prestigious Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award". Meanwhile, somewhere in the south Atlantic an embittered penguin and its attorneys are preparing a major case against Linus Torvalds and the entire open source software business... ®